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"Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith ..."
Bodies move together. Surging and sweating. The music is intoxicating. Sexual. Dangerous. Somewhere at the front of the crowd a young black man pulls a gun. His intentions have never been entirely clear but, as the band played on, the would-be gunman was kicked and stabbed to death by the security staff.
Altamont Speedway, San Francisco, 6 December 1969. The young man was called Meredith Hunter. The security staff were the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club - allegedly paid in beer and drugs for their services. And the band was the Rolling Stones.
Maybe you've forgotten. But this is a stark, cold reminder that the Rolling Stones are not just background musak - these men are deadly. They put the devil in their music. Dirty fingernails on dirty guitars. Unkempt hair and oozing sexuality. The Rolling Stones never simply step on stage they explode on to it. Dominating it and their audiences. They don't just push the boundaries of modern rock they define them.
The lyrics that open this article are from the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy with the Devil". It's the first cut from A side of "Beggar's Banquet" released a day and a year before their appearance at the Altamont free concert. Contrary to popular legend, "Sympathy for the Devil" was not the song being played when Meredith was killed at the free concert. The band was knocking out "Under My Thumb" at the time. As a result of public outcry, however, "Sympathy for the Devil" was dropped from their set-list for the next six years.
Jagger concedes that the song may have been something of an inspiration for all the '70s and '80s heavy metal bands that flirted with Satanism, but in interviews he's repeatedly distanced the Stones from any of it. In an exchange with Creem magazine, he said "I thought it was a really odd thing, because it was only one song, after all. It wasn’t like it was a whole album, with lots of occult signs on the back. People seemed to embrace the image so readily, [and] it has carried all the way over into heavy metal bands today."
But you could be forgiven for believing that the Rolling Stones may have forged a Faustian deal, because there's a darkness to the band's music that doesn't seem to be present in the work of its contemporaries. A darkness that has translated into one of the most enduring bands of all time.
In one form or another, the Rolling Stones has been performing for over 44 years.
There are many options of where it all began but I like to think it all started, oddly enough, in 1950, in a sandpit in the playground of Wentworth Country Primary school. This is the place where seven-year-old Mick Jagger first met another scruffy kid called Keith Richards. Mick remembers that Keith wanted to be a guitar-playing cowboy like Roy Rogers. He wasn't that fussed with the wild-west angle but he liked the idea of the guitar.
A decade later, the two had become avid fans of blues and American R&B, and shared a mutual friend in musician Dick Taylor. Jagger and Taylor were jamming together in Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Richards would soon join the group and become expelled from Dartford Technical College for truancy.
Skipping school was something he shared in common with another would-be-Stone. Across town Brian Jones had begun a career in truancy to practice the sax. By the time Jones had reached 16, the future Stone had fathered two illegitimate children and skipped town to Scandinavia, where he began to pick up guitar. Jones eventually drifted to London where he spent some time with Alexis Korner's Blues Inc., then made the move to start up his own band. While working at the Ealing Blues Club with a loose version of Blues Inc. and drummer Charlie Watts, Jones began jamming with Jagger and Richards on the side. Jagger would front the new band.
They couldn't have picked a better frontsman. This strutting creature with pouting lips and strangely alluring gangliness. A hairy-headed ladyboy whose performance was as much about his sexuality as it was about the music.
Recently it has been inferred that Sir Mick stole aspects of his performance from another great stage persona.
According to contactmusic.com, Jagger had been accused of waving his arms and staring into the crowd much like Hitler did during his political speeches. But Jagger says he does not feel insulted and claims his intentions are a lot less sinister.
He says, “All I want is for the crowd to have fun. Hitler was a brilliant crowd manipulator, but he wasn’t asking the crowd to enjoy themselves very much. But as a singer, you lead the audience, you cajole and praise and give them the songs they want.”
Jagger began to attract attention in Britain and the US. His on-stage persona developed from stiff school boy to a dancing, prancing, ambisexual, drunken, shotgun nightclub singer who either immediately attracted or repulsed viewers.
But Jagger was by no means alone up there on stage. He was accompanied by another iconic creature of rock. A shambling scarecrow that carried a guitar much the same way as a broadsword might be carried into battle. A mighty weapon that dealt out rock n' roll justice to the eager masses.
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